The discharge of water from a fire sprinkler is of concern to both building managers and fire service personnel. During normal operation of a building equipped with a fire sprinkler system, there should be no discharge of water from any fire sprinkler head. However, the failure rate of fire sprinkler heads, or physical damage to fire sprinkler heads, may result in the unintended discharge of water. Such water discharge may result in property damage, business loss and increased insurance costs for the building.
When a fire emergency occurs in a building equipped with a fire sprinkler system, the operation of the system is intended to cause a discharge of water in response to the ambient temperature near a fire sprinkler head exceeding a preset limit. In this situation, the fire sprinkler head is operating normally, and the precise location of any fire sprinkler heads discharging water is of interest to the fire incident commander, and any firefighters responding to the alarm. In some buildings, the design of the fire sprinkler system risers and feeder pipes includes a water flow sensor. Such a sensor may indicate which riser or feeder pipe has water flow, indicating one or more fire sprinkler heads are discharging water. However, the physical location of the water discharge is only known to a coarse resolution, as indicated by the water flow sensors.
Since the location of the fire within a building or structure is vitally important for planning firefighter response, information about the location of the discharging fire sprinkler heads would be an asset during a fire emergency.
For both the purposes of the building manager and the first responder team, any system reporting the location of a fire sprinkler water discharge must be very reliable. Since building management needs to manually shutoff the water, and direct the response of personnel, improper location information may lead to costly action in the wrong location. Similarly, the fire incident commander needs to minimize risk to firefighters while effectively managing the fire response, both of which require accurate location information about fire sprinkler head water discharge.
Finally, the detection mechanism must function properly over a range of acoustic environments. Since the most likely place for a water sprinkler discharge is also very noisy (i.e. flame front), a robust and accurate means of detection is required. However, a non-emergency situation may also include acoustic sources mimicking a fire sprinkler discharge, such as open water faucets, showers, waterfalls, fountains, and other architectural water features.
There continues to be a need for systems and methods which can automatically determine the existence and location of audible signals resulting from the discharge of water from fire sprinklers. Preferably such systems and methods could be integrated with new and into existing building or regional monitoring systems without requiring extensive redesign or additional hardware. It would also be desirable to be able to provide audible and/or visual indicators at monitoring system control panels so that those directing the response to the emergency will immediately be informed that one or more monitored fire sprinklers are discharging water.